by Harry Mazer
“Why? He’d be a jerk not to,” Andy said.
“Then I’m a jerk,” Ben said. “I’m not going to put a feather in Sergeant Bessie’s cap.”
When our orders were posted for advanced training, all four of us were assigned to the FMF, the Fleet Marine Force. These were the fighting marines we saw in the movies, the ones who stormed the beaches and fought the enemy hand to hand.
The day we left, Sergeant Bessie and Corporal Peeler came around to shake hands. A lot of guys milled around them. Ben walked away. I did too, but Sergeant Bessie came over to me and put his hand on my shoulder. “I expect you to make me proud, Pelko.”
“Thank you, sir.” And then I heard myself saying—and meaning—“I appreciate the toughness. I know it’s going to help me be a better marine.”
We shook hands on that.
As we boarded the train for Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, the new recruits were arriving. There was no mistaking them—the rumpled civvies, the same happy, dazed look that I must have had. “I feel sorry for those guys,” Roy said.
“Not me,” Andy said. “Nobody put chains on them.”
I didn’t feel sorry for them either. The truth was, if I felt anything, it was being a little superior. They looked young, green, and immature. They weren’t marines, and we were.
Camp Lejeune was for advanced combat training. Everything we did there was with rifle in hand. We’d been issued new rifles, weapons of our own, .30 caliber semiautomatic MIs. They came sealed in Cosmoline, which was greasy, like Vaseline. We had to disassemble and clean every inch of them. After we reassembled them, we brought our MIs to the armorer for inspection and received our leather rifle straps.
We did calisthenics with the rifle, ran with the rifle, did bayonet drill with the rifle … parrying left … parrying right … screaming, “Lunge … thrust … jab.” Different weapons were demonstrated. We learned about machine guns, the Browning automatic rifle—the BAR—and mortars and hand grenades. And we learned hand-to-hand combat with the KA-BAR, the marine fighting knife.
A colonel came one day and demonstrated a new kind of hand-to-hand, judo. He asked for a volunteer and pointed at Roy, who always stuck out because he was so big.
The colonel was a tough little guy with a smashed nose and a chest full of ribbons. He turned his back to Roy. “At me, son. You’re going to get me by surprise and slit my throat.”
“Is that an order, sir?”
Everybody laughed. “That’s an order,” the colonel snapped. “If you don’t kill me, I’m going to kill you, private.”
Roy ran at the colonel, got his arm around his neck, and then he went up over the colonel’s back and down on the ground. The colonel had Roy by the arm, with a foot on his chest. “I could break your arm now.”
After that we trained twice as hard.
We left Camp Lejeune as the Twelfth Replacement Company. We had thought we were a tough bunch when we arrived, but we were a lot tougher when we left.
The train taking us to San Diego took two weeks to cross the country. As Ben said, “If Sergeant Bessie was here, we would have jogged and gotten there a week earlier.” At the marine base in San Diego, we were given seventy-two-hour passes, a sure sign that we were shipping out. Andy and Roy took off to visit Andy’s relatives in L.A., and I took Ben home with me.
At the station Ben got a hot dog with a smear of mustard. “Want a bite?” he asked. I shook my head. I didn’t want to risk getting my uniform dirty. When my mother saw me, I wanted to look really sharp. I didn’t even want to sit down on the train because I was afraid of creasing my pants.
“Sit down,” Ben said. The train was moving.
“I’m nervous,” I said. “I haven’t seen my mother for seven months.”
“Think she won’t recognize you?”
“I’m afraid she’s still mad at me.”
Ben cracked his knuckles. “This is just between you and me,” he said, “but my mother’s in an institution. She’s been a patient in a state hospital for twelve years. Sometimes she thinks I’m an attendant. Sometimes I’m her brother—or nothing.”
“Gee, I’m sorry,” I said. There’d always been something about Ben that was different. Now I knew why. Right then, I made up my mind I wasn’t going to be blabbing about my mother all the time.
Ben shrugged. “It’s okay. I’m used to it. Sometimes she recognizes me. Which is nice.”
“You don’t have to worry,” I said. “I’m not going to say anything about this to the other guys.”
Ben gave that half smile of his. “Especially not to Andy. He’s a good egg, but he doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut.”
I didn’t have to worry about Mom or the way I looked. None of it mattered. She kept hugging me and kissing me. “God, you’re gorgeous!”
“Mom, hey, Mom.” I looked over at Ben, but he was grinning.
Bea was pulling on me. “I stayed home from school for you, Adam.”
I kissed the top of her head. “Bea, this is my friend.” Then she got silly and tried to pull my cap off. “Here,” I said, and put it on her head.
Mom had food waiting for us. “Sit down, boys. Everything’s ready.” But the moment we sat down, she said, “Do you boys need to wash up?”
“Mom! How did I manage without you all these months?”
Ben elbowed me. “Come on, lad. Your mother wants us to wash up.”
I went to the sink, washed my hands, and showed them to my mother. “Do I get a gold star now?”
“Two,” she said.
Ben finished washing his hands and hung up the towel. “I like your mother,” he said. “Mrs. Pelko, I brought something for you and Bea.”
He opened his zippered bag. He had a box of Fanny Farmer chocolates for Mom and a watercolor paint set for Bea. She went running off for paper and painted all the time we were eating.
Mom had prepared a feast—pork chops, mashed potatoes, creamed spinach, and candied carrots, and for dessert a chocolate cake with a whipped cream topping. “This is great, Mom,” I said.
“Best chocolate cake I ever ate,” Ben said.
“You’ve got a whipped cream mustache,” Bea said, pointing.
Ben wiped his mouth. “Better?” he asked Bea.
After we ate, Ben said he’d clean up. He put an apron on, and Bea burst out laughing. “A man with an apron on!”
Mom wouldn’t let Ben do anything. “You’re our guest.” He sat down with Bea, watching her try out the different paint colors on some old newspapers.
“Let’s leave everything for now,” Mom said. “I want to talk to you, Adam.”
“What about?” I said, but I knew. This was what I’d been dreading.
We went into the bedroom. “Don’t say anything,” she said. “Just listen. I’ve been carrying this around for seven months. I’m glad you’re home, don’t misunderstand me, and I wasn’t going to say anything, but I’m so mad at you!”
“Mom—” I started.
“No, please. Not a word. I just want you to understand, because of you, I’m mad at your grandfather. I know what you said to him, that old soldier routine.”
“Mom—”
“You don’t know how much you hurt me, Adam. You have no idea. Now you’re shipping out and what if something happens to you? What am I going to do then?” She started crying. “I’ve lost your father already and—”
“Mom. Don’t cry, please. I love you, Mom.” I put my arms around her. “Nothing’s going to happen to me. I promise you.”
“Nobody can promise that. Don’t you think your father promised?” She wiped her eyes and kissed me. “I want you to be so careful, when you’re over there.”
“I will, Mom.” I loved her so much right then. “I’m coming back to you.”
“Hey, you guys, where you been?” Andy said, when Ben and I got back to the base. “I’ve got some lovely ladies lined up for us tonight. My cousin set it up. The scuttlebutt is that this is going to be our last liberty.”
Ben said he wasn’t interested, and Roy had a girlfriend back home, so Andy and I caught the bus to San Diego. “What’s my date look like?” I asked.
“She’s a dish.” He was combing his hair and whistling. “She’s a friend of my cousin’s, and if he says she’s a dish, she’s a dish.”
“What if she doesn’t like me?”
“Hey, you’re a marine. She’s a normal girl, she’s going to like you! Stand tall, man.”
We met the girls outside the Crystal Room. The place was full of sailors. We got a table and sat down. Andy’s date, Veronica, was a really pretty girl who kept brushing her blond hair out of her eyes. I hadn’t caught my date’s name, and I didn’t want to ask. She had big dark eyes, and when she looked at me, I didn’t know what to say.
Andy and Veronica were talking, but this beautiful girl and I hardly spoke. Every time she looked at me, I smiled.
This was the first time I’d ever been in a nightclub. Andy ordered Southern Comfort for him and Veronica.
“Ditto,” I said.
“Helen?” Andy said.
“The same,” she said.
Helen, I thought. Her name was Helen. “Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in Greece,” I said.
“She was?” she said.
I nodded, hoping I had another sentence in me.
“How do you know that?”
“I guess I—I don’t know. I read it somewhere.”
She laughed, and after that she looked at me as if she liked me. Did she? I wanted to ask her. Do you like me?
Andy and Veronica got up to dance, and we did too. It was dark and the room was smoky. The band was playing “Begin the Beguine,” and we danced close and slow. “Sorry I’m not a better dancer,” I said.
“Oh, you’re fine,” she said.
“Helen.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I just wanted to say your name.” I was in a daze. I wanted to tell her she was sweet, sweet and beautiful, and I was going overseas, and I was in love with her. I wanted to ask her to be my girlfriend, to be mine, to write to me, to love me, to be the girl I’d come home to.
When we went back to the table, I asked, “Can I write to you?”
“Oh, that would be swell.” She wrote her address on a napkin, and I put it in my wallet.
“Don’t lose it,” she said.
“I’m never going to lose it.”
We held hands, and she told me she’d graduated high school and worked in a navy commissary. She was twenty. I didn’t tell her I had just turned eighteen.
I tried to think of more things to say. If I said the wrong thing, she’d know how young I really was, and that would be the end. I took a drink of the Southern Comfort and lit a cigarette. “Do you smoke?”
She shook her head. “I never liked it. It tastes so bad!”
“Are you sure?” I offered her my cigarette, and she took a puff, then made a face, and we both laughed. It was great. Her lipstick was on the cigarette. I stubbed it out and put it in my pocket.
Part Two
Okinawa, Spring
1945
Dear Mom,
I’m just sitting here on the deck of the LST (landing ship for troops, to you civilians!) enjoying the view. All we have to do is keep our weapons clean and dry and exercise. How are you and Bea doing? Did you get over being mad at Grandpa? I sure hope so. Tell Bea that when I get home, we’ll go together to visit him on the farm.
Well, Mom, I sure miss your cooking. Maybe you could send some of that chocolate cake we had. Ben and I still talk about it.
Tell Bea this morning I saw a school of dolphins, and I’ve seen flying fish, and the gulls are always around us looking for handouts, and one of the guys said he saw a whale. The best thing was a pure white albatross that stayed with us for a while. You should have seen it! Its wings were six feet, and it sort of hung in the air, hardly moving. Ben says that they make the longest migration of any bird, from almost the North Pole to the South Pole. Tell Bea she can take that to her teacher and wow her. And, Mom, the sailors say the albatross is good luck, so I know you’ll like hearing that.
Well, this is a pretty long letter. I better sign off because I’m running out of space.
Love from your son,
Adam
We’d been on the LST for over a week, and we still didn’t know where we were going. Everything was rumors, scuttlebutt that didn’t mean anything. All we really knew was that we were where we were, in the middle of the Pacific, part of a long line of LSTs creeping along at a steady six to ten knots. Once in a while we’d see a minesweeper. Mostly we just chugged steadily westward.
We had too much time. Every day we disassembled our weapons, wiped them dry, then oiled them, reassembled them, and cursed the sailors whenever they sprayed water in our direction. Salt and humidity were the deadly enemies of our weapons. There wasn’t much else to do except stay in shape, stare at the water, and wonder what was coming—and worry about enemy submarines. We’d already had one scare. One of the sailors had spotted a submarine that turned out to be a whale.
Then we ran into days of rough seas and the wind slapping the ship around. It had made us all sick. Andy and I had gotten over it fast, but not Roy and Ben. We were all out on the deck. You couldn’t go down below, it smelled so bad. Andy and I were sitting opposite each other on a folding cot, playing hearts. Ben was walking up and down with his hands over his stomach.
“Look at Roy,” Andy said. “He’s doing it again.” Roy was hanging over the side of the LST, puking. “Hey, Roy,” he yelled, “what do you want us to do with your cards?”
“Give it up,” I said. “The poor guy’s been at it for days.”
“You know, it stinks here.”
“Don’t remind me.” Even though the sailors hosed down the deck every day, you couldn’t get away from the smell from all the seasick marines.
“Hey, Ben,” I said, “do you want to play Roy’s cards?” He just shook his head.
“Come on, Pelko, concentrate,” Andy said. “I’m losing money here.” We were playing for pennies. He picked up a card and threw it down. “So where do you think we’re going today?”
“Same place we were going yesterday.”
“Which is?”
“Guam. Philippines. Japan. Take your pick.”
“Good-bye, Mama, I’m off to Yokohama,” he sang.
Ben passed by and said, “They’ll send us where they’ll send us, and we’ll get there when we get there.”
Somewhere in the Pacific
Dear Helen,
Well, how are you? Have you been going to the commissary to work? What time do you go in? Do you take a bus? Or maybe your father drives you? What does he do? Well, I have a thousand questions for you, and I hope you have a thousand more for me.
Helen, I have to tell you something right off. I never thought it could happen to me so fast, the way I feel about you. I think we were meant for each other, but if you feel the same way, forget I said it. Let it be like we’re just getting to know each other, and we’re telling each other all about ourselves. So write back as soon as you can. I’ll be looking for your letter.
Your friend (I hope your best friend!)
Pvt. Adam Pelko, 12th Replacement Draft, USMC
P.S. I never met a girl like you before!
Some days later, we started hearing the sound of distant guns, and that night there were flashes in the sky and then explosions. We were all up on the deck, watching. In the morning, we woke to find ourselves in the midst of an armada of Allied warships—more ships than I’d ever seen in my life. Huge, flat-topped carriers, gun-heavy battlewagons, schools of destroyers and cruisers, and hundreds of cargo vessels, ammo ships, fuel ships, and troop-carrying LSTs and tiny amtracs.
There’d been a battle here. I could smell it—fire and burning oil. I could see it—ships with holes torn out of them and clouds of inky smoke hanging over everything. The antiaircraft guns were pointed skyward, and the big battlesh
ip cannons were intermittently shelling some barely visible target. All we could see was a long green line that seemed to float above the water. It was Okinawa.
The CO, the commanding officer, assembled us all on the tank deck. “Okinawa is where you men are going.” He was up on a tank. “The Japanese resistance is fierce. They know that once we take Okinawa, their country is next. They’re attacking our fleet with everything they’ve got … every plane they have, and half of them are kamikazes—suicide pilots crashing into our ships.”
“It’s Pearl Harbor again,” I said to Ben.
“It’s different, Pelko. We’re attacking now.”
I knew it was different. I knew we weren’t being taken by surprise. I knew the Arizona was gone—it wasn’t sinking here. And my father was gone—he wouldn’t die here. I knew, I knew, I knew, but I had that same hollow tight feeling in my chest, half fear and half rage. Now, I thought. Now we pay back the Japanese for what they did to us, for starting the war, for killing my father. For a moment I thought of Davi Mori, then I pushed him out of my mind. Davi wasn’t the enemy.
Our LST unloaded directly on the beach. The big cargo doors swung open, and we stepped off. No climbing down cargo nets with fifty-pound packs. No bobbing Higgins boats. No heart-stopping race for cover under a barrage of enemy fire.
No enemy fire.
The landing had been about as dangerous as stepping off a ferry. We didn’t even get our feet wet.
We stood around on the beach like a bunch of gawking tourists and watched as the ship was unloaded. Ben, Roy, Andy, and I dragged our gear into the shade of an antitank vehicle. Trucks were coming and going, spitting up dust, and tanks clattered across farm fields. The beach was piled high with supplies, and our CO, Captain Weaver, put us to work loading up trucks. Boxes of ammo, mortars, explosives, coils of wire, communication equipment, and five-gallon cans of water. Ben and I stayed together, but we had lost sight of Andy and Roy. We loaded truck after truck. I sweated and swigged water from my canteen. By midmorning we were done.